Imagine, if you will, that you're a star athlete in a professional sport. You played at a local high school, went to the state college, and now play for the local professional team. But what if another city, across the country, money-rich and talent-poor, offers you 3 to 4 times the salary to come play for them?

Would you move--put a different state's driver's license in your wallet and plates on your car, send your kids to a school where they learn that state's history and acquire its cultural traits and loyalties--and play against your former teammates and fans for more money? In professional team sports, players do this every year--it's accepted and expected. Professionals in many other fields often do the same.

What if, however, instead of another city or state, the team offering more money were a country? And they wanted you to compete against your home country in world championships and the Olympics? If you accepted the money and switched teams you would be roundly criticized as a traitor and mercenary, accused of trading your birthright, shunned by your brother and called terms like "morally weird" by people as high as the IAAF general secretary. This was the case for Kenyan-born Stephen Cherono, who became a Qatari citizen in 2003--reportedly in exchange for $1,000/month for life--changed his name to Saif Saaeed Shaheen and won the 2005 world steeplechase title for his new team.

What if it isn't so much instant money that lures you to move, but better long-term prospects or a better quality of life for you and your family? This seems to be deemed a more honorable reason for changing nationalities, although if you're of a different color, cultural heritage and sporting history, you may likely end up lukewarmly welcomed by your new team's fans, and still considered part of your original team years after you've changed passports. Take, for example, Bernard Lagat, who became a U.S. citizen in 2004 and has won numerous international medals wearing the red, white and blue. Yet a Sept. 12, 2011, Sports Illustrated article still identified him as a foreigner, when, talking about the 1500m, they called it "an event U.S. runners adore but have struggled to contest (other than Kenyan expatriate Bernard Lagat)."

Sports teams and loyalties always engender strong emotions, but add in nationality and patriotism, as we do in professional running where the only "teams" are based on citizenship, and the landscape gets even more complicated and volatile. The actions of Qatar (and Bahrain), openly recruiting and paying runners, and the difficulty for American fans to feel that a Kenyan immigrant is truly "one of us" both hit against deeply rooted but often tacit rules and expectations for Olympic teams and athletes. With the Olympic year upon us, and the world and its citizens increasingly globalized, it's an appropriate time to consider what the questions are, and bring forward these beliefs about national identity, representation, amateurism, citizenship and the role of the state.

OUR TEAM

Walk down a city street anywhere in America and you'll see numerous shirts, hats and jackets declaring loyalty to a sports team: professional, college or high school. You'll overhear discussions of last night's game, see games or highlights on screens in every bar and restaurant, even catch an emotional lift or depression based on the local team's recent success. Team identification can bar you from entering some establishments, or cause a fight: Try wearing a Duke shirt into a Chapel Hill bar, or a Yankees hat into a North End Boston pub. Not coincidentally, some of these fan groups call themselves a "nation," such as the Red Sox Nation and Husker Nation.

The players on these teams that attract such loyal local followers are both drawn from around the country and the world and often traded between teams. Trades have rules, but can happen mid-season, sometimes even mid-game, such as when Ubaldo Jimenez started a game for the Colorado Rockies, then came off the mound after one inning to be told he would now be pitching for the Cleveland Indians. Fans adjust, cheering for him one game and booing the next. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld lampooned this, commenting, "You're actually rooting for the clothes when you get right down to it … Boo! Different shirt. Boo!" But the shirt has the name of a city or state on it, and thus fans feel the athlete is playing "for" them in some metaphorical way.

American running, as a professional sport, has but one team: Team USA, which takes on other national teams in international competitions like the Olympic Games. Lacking other identification, runners are often tied to these national "teams" all the time, even in professional marathons, road races or track meets. Just after the world championships, for example, the New York Road Runners sent out a press release on the results of their Fifth Avenue Mile in which Lagat's and Jenny Simpson's victories were proclaimed a "double USA victory," despite the fact that in this and any other open race, runners aren't selected, coached or funded by a national federation, and represent their country only in that they carry a passport. Yet professional races wrap victors in their country's flags, the World Marathon Majors puts runners in national "uniforms," and Boston plays the winners' respective national anthems. Linking runners to their nationality in these contexts, however, makes all non-Americans the "other" team to fans, thus leading to stories about how many years it's been since an American won Boston and the like. In contrast, you'll find no stories lamenting American Trevor Hoffman losing the all-time save record last summer to Panamanian pitcher Mariano Rivera.

Even more significant, however, is what's expected from a member of a national team. The athlete, for his or her part, is expected to compete out of a love for their country--to consider the honor of wearing the national colors greater than any monetary reward and superseding any competing loyalties or identities. Any athlete who's suspected of passing up or sabotaging a chance to compete for their nation to race better at a professional event is castigated (recall Khalid Khannouchi in 2000), as is one who shows ambiguity in loyalties, such as when Meb Keflezighi posed with both the U.S. and Eritrean flags after winning a U.S. national championship. The honor and duty of running for your country feel parallel to military service--historians Randy Roberts and James S. Olson in Winning is the Only Thing: Sports in America since 1945 use the term "national soldiers of sport," soldiers fighting for their country's honor.
Besides their role and attitude, the public expects more from Olympic athletes in terms of who they are. While a professional player needs only to be excellent in his or her sport, play locally and wear the local colors, a national player is expected to represent the shared ethos of the nation, the national identity. The myth of the Olympics is that it's a summoning of the heroes--the best from among "our kind," "our people," an ideal representation of who we are--from every "tribe and nation." The "nation" here is part of a Biblical phrase, long predating the modern "nation-state." Here's where multiculturalism, migrants and globalization can create emotional dissonance, and where we're forced to examine our concepts of citizenship and national identity.

TRUE-BLOODED AMERICAN

A fan declaring that a recent immigrant is "not really an American" reveals the cognitive difference between "nation" and "state." The state is simply a territory controlled by a government. Anyone with legal citizenship is a member of the group defined by the state, and, providing you hold the right documentation (especially if you're the president), no one questions your legitimacy. The nation, a more ambiguous distinction, refers to the "people" of a country who share a common history and/or set of cultural characteristics. These may be imaginary, but nonetheless adequately felt to unite citizens so that they can distinguish between "us" (inside the nation) and "them" (all others). Nationalism is the desire to unite the nation and state, either politically, by changing the state, or culturally, by uniting the people under one banner. At its best nationalism unites a country emotionally and willfully; at its worst it inflames ethnic pride and prejudice; at its extreme it produces fascism, war and ethnic cleansing.

It's not surprising that, outside of the military, we in the U.S. feel some of our strongest national pride and identity around sports. As a nation of immigrants, the U.S. needed to create elements of shared identity to unite a diverse population, particularly in the late 19th century in the aftermath of the Civil War and during the cultural disruption of the Industrial Revolution. The U.S. wasn't alone in needing symbols to unite people under newly invented nation-states during this era of political upheaval. Sport provided a forum for the construction of a national character, and the modern Olympics, born in 1896, elevated this to a new level by tying sporting teams to nations and mandating that individuals must participate in the games as representatives of their country's national Olympic committee.

In his book Making the American Team, historian Mark Dyreson details the efforts in the U.S. to tie the Olympic athlete to the national identity during this era, efforts that led to the still persistent belief that our Olympians win "because they are Americans and because the American way of life has provided them with an unbeatable combination of virtues, habits, and spirit."

As with other aspects of nationalism, at its best, this pride inspires unity, passion and purpose; at its worst it elevates ethnocentricity and the ugly side of partisan team pride--where no calls against "our" team could possibly be right, injury to an opponent is celebrated, and the other team is inherently inferior, probably evil--to the global stage.

FOR THE LOVE OF THE SPORT

Intimately tied to the rise of the Olympics and collegiate sports in the 19th century was the concept of amateurism. While the Amateur Athletic Union and Olympic founders posited the ideal of sport for sport's sake as an ancient tradition, historians point out that the original Olympians were most certainly professionals, and money swirled around the ancient games. What's more, nearly all organized athletic contests prior to the mid-19th century were professional events, including "pedestrianism," the precursor of track and road racing. Amateurism was an invented tradition of the 19th century leisure class, sold as an ideal. From the beginning of the movement, bureaucrats and institutions (colleges, sponsors, media) gained power and wealth from these sports, but the notion that athletes shouldn't be paid for play took hold.

In a fascinating book, Patriotic Games, which explains the interconnectedness of the origins of nationalist and amateur traditions, historian S.W. Pope writes, "To mystify the seamier reality, the newly invented 'amateur tradition' was quickly cast in moral and nationalistic terms. The bureaucrats of amateurism made their case in the early twentieth century by linking their cause to Americanism--a vision that continues to be accepted as the given, natural, and purest form of sport today." While "shamateurism"--amateurs supported through subterfuge and circuitous routing of funds--fell in the 1980s, and now professional athletes compete and receive money as part of national teams, the amateur "ideal" persists.

Here's where the Qatar/Bahrain situation rankles: When countries blatantly act like professional teams, actively recruiting and paying athletes, the countries and the athletes are failing to play by tacit rules that see national teams composed of citizens emerging from and tied to their nation by birth and character, volunteer sporting soldiers running for their nation out of love and honor. When viewed as the professional sporting event the Olympics have become in today's global and commercially driven world, the Qatar/Bahrain strategy appears simply as the logical conclusion. Admittedly, the requirement that athletes change their names crosses other, more personal boundaries of identity, but who among us wouldn't take $1,000/month over subsistence farming to practice our profession for a different company, team or country--particularly if, as in the case of the athletes recruited by Middle Eastern countries, you can remain living and training at your home?
But citizenship implies more than performing on a team, even for athletes, as the bizarre case of Leonard Mucheru reveals. Recruited by Bahrain in 2003, the Kenyan-born runner competed wearing their colors as Mushir Salem Jawher for several years. In 2007, however, he ran, and won, the Tiberius Marathon in Israel, and The Jerusalem Post heralded him as the first Arab athlete to take part in an Israeli marathon. Although Mucheru was participating as an individual in a professional event, not representing a country in any sense, Bahraini sports and government authorities stripped him of his Bahraini passport for violating the laws of Bahrain, which doesn't recognize Israel as a state. Kenya initially refused to take Mucheru back, leaving him temporarily stateless. Kenya eventually reinstated him both as a citizen and a national athlete.

The relationship between government and team gets fuzzy in tales like this, and leads to the question, why should a government be running a sports team at all? In the U.S., it doesn't: Neither the USOC nor the USATF are government agencies and neither receives federal funds. This isn't the case in much of the world. Throughout the Cold War, much was made of the distinction between our "amateur" athletes and the government-supported mercenaries from the Soviet bloc, which had a much more prosaic view of athletes as workers for the state like any other professional. Not only are teams elsewhere government funded but sports agencies often have political power over citizens' choices.

Romania is one such country that both supports its athletes financially and controls them. Adriana (Pirtea) Nelson reveals that once you've been identified as having athletic ability, as a Romanian youth you're required to report to training sessions and camps, even in lieu of your academic work, and the state coaches mandate what events you train for and compete in. Ironically, she and nearly all of the top Romanian marathoners, who've had considerable historical success, (Constantina Dita, Luminita Talpos, Nuta Olaru, Anuta Catuna) now live in Colorado and have become or are in the process of becoming U.S. citizens; Romania had no marathoners in the 2011 world championships. All cite the desire for freedom of choice and the U.S.'s politics-free selection process as high on their reasons for changing allegiances.

Most countries have less controlling structures, but the majority--from the UK to Australia, Japan, Ethiopia, and tiny Trinidad and Tobago, to name a few--have some sort of federal "ministry of sport" that oversees their national teams.

In contrast, the U.S. "team" consists simply of individuals who meet the criteria to compete--sportscaster and running industry commentator Toni Reavis calls them "independent contractors." The basic criterion is that they be legal U.S. citizens (which is controlled by the State Department, completely outside the realm of sport) but IOC and the USATF set additional rules as administrators of these sports leagues. The government-mandated USOC role is as the designated agency to specify who fills the limited available spaces.

Those limited spaces hark back to the ideal image, the summoning of heroes from every tribe and nation. Each country gets to send a select number of their best, with the idea that each "people" will be represented.

American athletes grow up in a context of "the best of" in concentric circles. We track records by school, conference, state and nation, and the best advance from one to the other as they win championships. These are primarily geographic distinctions, but membership can be questioned and issues of appropriateness arise at every level. Does a school record set by an exchange student count? Should a star athlete who moved in when he was a senior take the quarterback or starting pitcher position from a "local" who's been working towards it all his life? Should a state championship include the same number of runners from each region, or more "at large" runners selected by best times?

The same questions and feelings arise on a national scale, such as when an exceptional immigrant joins "our team" as an adult, changing the national records and taking one of the finite spaces on the team. Someone from a nation that dominates the U.S. on the track and roads, who has a different history, language and culture than the majority of U.S. runners, may well not feel like "our" hero in an idealized Olympics. But that person is unarguably an American citizen. Track, with its clear, apolitical selection process, alleviates some of the questions and politics. Yet it still feels counterintuitive to the idea of the Olympics to watch a competition comprised of, say, 12 representatives of one nation (e.g., Kenya) competing under the flags of several states (e.g., Kenya, Qatar, Bahrain, Netherlands, United States).

IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL

Recent history suggests that we as a sporting nation may need to get over it, and adopt a broader view both of ourselves as a country and the world of countries. Mobility of labor and laborers makes old national divisions increasingly irrelevant. Living and working "abroad" isn't what it used to be: People travel and work globally more easily than ever, many companies are global, immigrants retain closer ties to "home" and travel back and forth more often, and more are retaining dual or multiple citizenship. In every industry, the best from around the world make their way to the best place to ply their trade, be they scientists, chefs, programmers or athletes. Professional athletes of all types--soccer, baseball, basketball--live and compete on teams in countries other than their own. In sport, as in all of life today, "good enough for a town of this size" isn't good enough--the world is one town.

Readers of our high school coverage will note that this fully domestic realm has recently been dominated by immigrants and visitors who live and go to school among us. You can find stories throughout the country such as one in the Sept. 24, 2011, edition of The Columbus Dispatch about Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants bolstering a cross country team in a suburban Ohio high school. Mo Farah, a UK citizen selected as the 2011 European Athlete of the Year, was born Somali and trains with Alberto Salazar and many "Team USA" runners in Oregon. Mo is the future.

America is, of course, a land of immigrants, a global nation, our primary characteristic a hearty welcome ("Give me your tired, your poor …"). Yet today even strongly nationalistic counties are changing: In 1999, Germany, for the first time in its history, began allowing people without German ancestry to become citizens; Japan is feeling increased pressure to loosen its laws to accept more immigrants.

As traditional ideas of national boundaries and identity get blurred, perhaps we'll see progress toward a world championship (and a world) where people don't have to align with a political state to compete. While not without problems, it seems that a professional model like baseball is more in line with the reality of the world, where you can easily have a Dominican pitch to a Venezuelan, who hits a high fly over a Japanese outfielder's head, scoring a Panamanian and a Californian--and causing rejoicing both in Texas (the team's home), and among family, friends and countrymen from each home state and country. Someday we may have a running world championship where professionals like Stephen Cherono can sell their skills and not have to change their passports and identities.

Professional road racing is such a venue, a place where individuals, free of national federations or amateur unions, can compete openly. Defying the bureaucracy and hypocrisy of the AAU and its ilk is part of the history and legacy of road racing: Let's not muddy it up with nationalities. What road racing lacks, however, for the sports fan, is the critical element of teams.

RUNNING PAST NATIONALITY

Where we do have teams, for now, is at world championships and the Olympics. And, despite all the ambiguity and culturally mandated expectations regarding nationalism and amateurism, there are elements of authenticity in the ideal. Athletes do run for love of the sport, and running without reward is sport at its purest form. As in any profession, the core is worth doing for its own sake, and true joy would come from being able to do it without the pressure of economics. Those of us who live for running but do it at sub-professional levels are the true amateurs. We understand and value this love of the sport, but, never being good enough to have to choose whether to make it our living, we can't hold professionals to a mythical standard and expect them to make economic choices we likely wouldn't.

Athletes also love their countries, want to bring honor to their flags and appreciate the privilege of representing their nations. To hear your national anthem played in honor of your actions evokes true emotion. Note how Jenny Simpson connected her efforts with a chance to honor her sister and country while winning the 1500m at the world championships in Daegu last summer: "My little sister is serving in the Army," Simpson said after her race. "So I thought, 'Man, if I win gold I get to play that national anthem for her.' So coming down the last 100 meters I was thinking about my little sister and thinking, 'Let's get that song playing.'"

Life and loyalties can be complex, however. Consider Constantina Dita, who says that she was proud to win the gold in Beijing for Romania, even though she'd lived and trained in Colorado for years before that race--because Romania was where she began, where her home and family are. But, now a U.S. citizen, she wipes tears away when asked to describe what it would mean to her if she had the chance to win and hear the USA anthem, the anthem of the country that has accepted her, given her opportunities, and where she sees the future for her and her son. Still, she's faced with a tough choice as she's not yet eligible to run for the U.S. and has a guaranteed spot on the Romanian team for 2012 provided she runs a qualifying time, a spot she could take with her dual citizenship. Doing so would delay her chance to run for the U.S., yet, at 41, this could easily be her last Olympic opportunity.

Mixed emotions are to be expected in a newcomer. Colleen de Reuck told me about her feelings at the world cross country championships the first time she wore the U.S. uniform: "I was very apprehensive, as I knew the South Africa team would be there. I felt disloyal to South Africa--then I felt disloyal to America because I was feeling disloyal to South Africa." The topic is so fraught with emotion that several athletes either refused to talk about it or declined to answer my request for an interview for this story. Mixed emotions are to be expected in welcoming newcomers, too--it can take time, sometimes generations, for a new family even from a different state to be fully accepted as part of a small town.

What should we, as runners and running fans, take from all of this? Perhaps simply to cut athletes some slack. Let's consider national teams as just that--teams--and the players as athletes, not cultural soldiers, "athletic missionaries," or a monastic order requiring vows of poverty and asceticism. As fans of this team, it's right to celebrate their success, but be leery of linking that success to any statement of cultural or national superiority. And, just as it's natural to cheer louder for your child while supporting a school team, we as fans may feel a closer affinity to someone who grew up near us and shares our history, yet this doesn't preclude us from giving our full support to athletes who choose to wear our colors, athletes who've made the decision to represent us rather than simply falling into it through the accident of birth in a particular place.

We can and should also feel free to celebrate, without feeling unpatriotic, performances of people we know and respect regardless of their team colors. Running, of all sports, transcends politics, gives no credence to birthright or popularity but celebrates success through individual effort and excellence. As the games begin, let's let running excellence transcend even the politics of nations.